Closing the gap between current production rates and that perfect 7.2 million figure is the mission of Simon Keighley, a consultant for Hagen & Co. Keighley arrived in February to help Port Wentworth teams break through bottlenecks and improve performance.

Closing the gap between current production rates and that perfect 7.2 million figure is the mission of Simon Keighley, a consultant for Hagen & Co.

Hagen & Co. has a 20-year history of harnessing untapped potential for companies ranging from Coca-Cola to BP. The company’s consultants are known for their ability to help multidisciplinary teams crack long-standing unsolvable problems — the problems that have been around for so long that employees believe they’ll never go away. Hagen & Co. reports that, as a result, they’ve saved clients an average of $3 million to $5 million per plant, per year.

At Port Wentworth, where the refinery is still ramping up to full production since reopening in November 2009, the challenge is bringing all stations up to maximum output without down time or waste, 24 hours a day.

“That’s why we engaged Hagen & Co.,” says Refinery Manager Jim Flynn. “We’ve put together a team of eight to work with Simon, and they’re taking a very structured, focused approach to working through problems. We knew that with Hagen’s rigorous problem-solving approach and our employees’ experience, we’d have a good combination.”

Hagen & Co.’s proprietary problem-solving approach – which the company calls “Control Factor Analysis” – falls within the proven production efficiency framework of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process, which comes from the industry disciplines of Six Sigma.

Keighley’s task is to train teams of employees in the technique, which methodically isolates and remedies root causes of any and all production problems.

For Port Wentworth teams to learn the ropes of DMAIC, they’ll have to work through challenging details, including to determine how to make refined sugar whiter, how to remove current bottlenecks and how to use water more efficiently throughout the refinery. The process will require doing time studies, measuring data and analyzing data using Control Factor Analysis. Each day, the team will determine what next steps they need to take, whether they are gathering more data or putting a solution in place.

Simon Keighley (L) and Stephen Downey are consultants for Hagen & Co. Keighley advises Imperial Sugar at the Port Wentworth plant near Savannah, Ga. while Downey is assigned to Imperial Sugar at Gramercy, La.

With training and experience under their belts, DMAIC team members will go back to their work stations knowing how to solve everyday problems using the DMAIC process, and spreading the culture of DMAIC to their colleagues.

“What we say at the start of a project is, not only will we deliver an improvement that’s bigger than you expect, but you’ll have a team of people who understand what’s different about how they’ve worked in the past few weeks,” says Keighley. “And they’ll be role models for driving continuous improvement, using the techniques they’ve learned.”

Data pointing to increased production and efficiency at Port Wentworth is now beginning to come in, with a 30 percent increase in throughput in the last 6 weeks. But refinery manager Jim Flynn doesn’t need data to confirm what he has already noticed — that bringing together six operators from different stations within the refinery has gone a long way toward fostering increased work communications and efficiencies.

“One person’s station might be suffering because of the way another person runs his station,” Flynn says. “But thanks to the hybrid nature of these teams, operators can solve problems together. That’s one reason people want to be on these teams: It’s an effective process.

“You can see things changing right before your eyes.”

Simon Keighley of Hagen & Co. identifies equipment to be examined or tested.

First the refinery team dissolves the sugar into a syrup that resembles a straw-colored solution, then filters out color impurities by passing the sugar solution through columns holding charcoal, or “char” — time-proven equipment that dates back to the early 1900s.

What the refinery team began to observe, though, was that during high production of sugar, the color analysis reported by the lab of the concentrated sugar syrup flowing out of the char was degrading.

“We could predict that by a certain date that we wouldn’t be able to produce white sugar to meet finished product specifications at the 6,200,000 pounds-per-day rate,” says Refinery Manager Jim Flynn. “Color is one of the reasons our production is constrained.”

Getting to the root of the issue meant reexamining their decades-old process for making sugar.

That’s why Imperial Sugar contracted Hagen & Co., a consulting firm that has fine-tuned a problem-solving technique to help teams improve performance.

“The process we’re going through now requires rigorous analysis to get to the root of our color problem. And — as we’re learning in this process — the root of a problem often is not what you think it is initially,” says Flynn.

Hagen & Co.’s proprietary technique, called “Control Factor Analysis,” falls within the framework of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process, which hails from Six Sigma. The technique focuses on finding out which part of a process — or which “control factor” — is off kilter, then takes steps to solve the problem.

Eight highly experienced Port Wentworth workers, plucked from different areas of the refinery, have come together to form the DMAIC team. Imperial Sugar’s President and CEO John Sheptor joined the group, not as top executive but rather utilizing his career as an engineer and to deliver resources needed to speed the process. A number of corrective actions have been implemented as a result of his ideas.

Their goal: To make sugar that is consistently purer than anything else on the market, while bringing cost-saving efficiencies and streamlined systems.

Every morning for the past four weeks, this DMAIC team has huddled at 6:30 a.m. in a room deep inside the sugar refinery. The walls are plastered with large Post-It sheets listing next action steps and processes that need addressing. Simon Keighley of Hagen & Co. stands before the group, facilitating. The group runs through the previous day’s action steps, then identifies what needs to be examined or tested next.

The team has spent the past four weeks working through 200 different actions to pinpoint char-house issues and improve production. While it is not unusual for a sugar refinery to strive for constant purity, Imperial Sugar’s approach is to examine and profoundly improve a decades-old process.

“We started by inspecting the symptoms more closely than anyone had inspected them before,” explains Keighley. “We looked at the facts of the situation. We didn’t make any assumptions.”

After the first two weeks, the group had identified the top 10 factors affecting char-house production, ranging from poorly functioning equipment to the texture of the char itself.

“One thing we discovered, for example, was that the char wasn’t the same as it used to be, and we wondered why,” says Flynn. When char is fresh, it looks like course pepper. Over time, it breaks down into fine particles, which should be screened out by existing equipment. But the screens weren’t working properly.

With too many fine particles in the mix, it took longer for the sugar solution to flow through. (Imagine trying to flow liquid through course grain versus fine powder.) Output bottlenecked. “So you could try to decrease the sugar content of the solution, and increase your flow rate, but then it takes longer to boil down later in the process,” explains Keighley. Workers could try to do more sugar washing to get color out, but that meant some of the sugar would be lost and water wasted.

“The rate-limiting factor, then, were these particles,” says Keighley. “Removing the fine particles was critical to improving color and sugar content.”

The solution came in the form of equipment repair, as well as some process improvements. “What I thought was cool about this was that some of our team members came up with very creative solutions,” says Flynn.

One technician, Dean Jordan, devised an ingenious way to increase the rate at which certain char-house equipment was removed for cleaning then returned — allowing for increased production rates.

As a result, says Flynn, “We are seeing much better colors. That means, instead of slowing down to produce better color, we can maintain higher production rates and send more material to packaging.”

Both Keighley and Flynn see this process as the beginning of a culture shift. “We need dozens of teams like this in place, working on continuous improvements,” says Flynn. “Simon is working with us to develop ways of sustaining the structure we’ve started.”

“What we hope will come out of this is that we can move on and look at other stations in the plant and say, What problems do we see? And how can we stop them?” says Keighley. “We’ll use this as a stepping stone to assist with a training program throughout the plant.”

Members of the Port Wentworth DMAIC team are:
George Sexton, Operator, White Sugar Pan Boiler
Dean Jordan, Instrument Electrical Technician
Gerrad Kerby, Maintenance Mechanic
Ricky Kessler, Low-Grade Boiler Operator
Kerry Maennache, Affination Operator
John Burke, Shift Superintendent
Robert Wilkerson, White Sugar Melter Man
Michel Whitaker, Reliability Engineer